Re: Why the future doesn't matter (much)

"You seem to think of AI much like current AI - automated cars and the like: useful tools for humans. I'm thinking more of genuine intelligence..." Whether or not an AI is a "tool for humans" has no bearing on the pragmatics of a Google car navigating the road. You're simply not understanding. If you're making the claim that AI would come to "dominate" humans, that would only happen if they were competing for the same ecological niche. That can't happen if they're simply some "intelligence" tucked away on a server somewhere. They would first need to occupy the real world in order to compete for our place in it; but by inhabiting the real world, that entails dealing with the same environmental constraints as any other physical species. Google cars are a perfectly salient example of that because the pragmatic issue of getting around results in a kind of parallel evolution regardless of whether you're an independent intelligence or a tool. But perhaps you're just too invested in the prospect of human extinction to see the issue clearly. "To just label the concerns of these scientists and philosophers "bourgeois" is very odd to me" It's not just a label. People such as yourself who have been deskbound their entire lives are more easily consumed by ideological flights of fancy. This can include those with either a utopian or dystopian worldview (typically leftist). People with working class jobs, on the other hand, tend to be more conservative, presumably because people with a more rigid worldview are more amenable to hands-on professions in which the way things work are always the same. This division even includes divisions within the medical profession in which physicians tend to be Democrats while surgeons (a more hands-on field) tend to be Republicans. One should always be cognizant of the kinds of fallacies you risk falling prey to in order to avoid having your head in the clouds or or in the sand.